Fragmentation
As processes are loaded and removed from memory, the free memory space is broken into little pieces. It happens after sometimes that processes can not be allocated to memory blocks considering their small size and memory blocks remains unused. This problem is known as Fragmentation.
Fragmentation is of two types
| S.N. | Fragmentation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | External fragmentation | Total memory space is enough to satisfy a request or to reside a process in it, but it is not contiguous so it can not be used. |
| 2 | Internal fragmentation | Memory block assigned to process is bigger. Some portion of memory is left unused as it can not be used by another process. |
External fragmentation can be reduced by compaction or shuffle memory contents to place all free memory together in one large block. To make compaction feasible, relocation should be dynamic.